Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Getting a little whiplash here, but could the Reuters/Zogby shock poll showing John McCain pulling ahead of Barack Obama by five points nationally, and pulling out to a 9-point advantage on the economy be an outlier? Maybe. MSNBC and other mainstream outlets completely ignored the poll today, perhaps because they've got their very own branded polls ... but you'd think this one would be news.

The latest MSNBC/WaPo poll shows Obama still in the lead, up 45%-42%, but half the lead he held last month. But the poll shows the opposite of the Zogby finding on the economy, despite also showing warning signs for Barack:

“Whatever momentum that Obama took into the summer, he really appears to have lost it,” says Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. “It is not a dead heat, but it is close.”

The survey also shows that both presidential candidates face their share of challenges. For Obama, he receives the support of just one in two voters who backed Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and he trails his Republican rival on handling terrorism, the war in Iraq and international crises like the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia.

As for McCain, nearly eight in 10 voters believe that the Arizona senator would closely follow President Bush’s policies if elected, and respondents view him as the weaker candidate on the issues of the economy and health care — which rank among the public’s top concerns in the poll.

Back to the Zogby poll: David Moore at pollster.com gives it a good working over:

All pollsters, it seems, eventually find themselves with what Andy Kohut once referred to as "loopy" results. His comment was about the Gallup polls in the 2000 election, though in September 2004, Pew experienced such results itself, and of course several polls this campaign season have produced inexplicable or "wrong" numbers, as indicated by the subsequent primary election vote counts.

This time, it's Zogby's turn to confuse the masses. His latest Reuters/Zogby poll, based on a sample of 1,089 "likely voters" drawn from listed telephone numbers, conducted Aug. 14-16, 2008, shows McCain over Obama by 46% to 41%.

Two days earlier, Zogby reported substantially different results. His online poll (of self-selected people who want to be part of his Internet polling sample) of 3,339 "likely voters," conducted Aug. 12-14, showed Obama with a three-point lead, 43% to 40%.

By Zogby's own calculation of the margins of error of each poll, the difference between the two polls in McCain's support (46% in the later telephone poll vs. 40% in the earlier online poll) is statistically significant. The difference in Obama's support (41% vs. 43% respectively) would not be statistically significant. Still, the 8-point difference in the margin of McCain's lead would be significant - a McCain 5-point lead vs. an Obama 3-point lead in the earlier poll.

If we believe both polls, the period of Aug. 13-14 must have been a real bummer for Obama and an electoral high for McCain. Whatever it was that caused millions of voters to "change" their minds and gravitate toward the Republican candidate in the two-day period, however, escaped my notice. Perhaps others have been more observant.

Moore also slams Zogby's "refusal" to use "sound methods of designing his samples," including using only listed phone numbers and self-selected online samples. Two problems that could make both the Zogby results less credible. Maybe that's why Chuckie T pretended the poll didn't exist today.

Good for my blood pressure, though I don't think it erases Obama's creeping message problem, something he is trying to address with limited attack ads and tougher rhetoric. But I agree with Josh Marshall on one big point: Obama simply must stop asking, begging, whatever, John McCain to stop attacking his patriotism. Instead, he needs to come up with three salient, succinct attacks on John McCain, and repeat them 100 times a day, every day between now and November 4th.

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, John McCain, polls, presidential candidates